i bear down like i want the horse to get there, yesterday. no one gives a fuck about your table numbers.

truth talk. that’s my wedding theme: no one gives a fuck. they just want free food. and favors, that’s a thing. “thanks for being my friend!” i sort of thought renting 12 cabins was a favor. “they’ll be so glad!”

you think you can do it differently, but that’s just a single pearlescent bead on your vintage heirloom bracelet of majestic delusions.

the centerpiece titanic blue heart charm, bought from pandora’s box of thoughtlessly named stores, is the idea that you yourself don’t care about all this. “ha ha!” (drinks tap water from a pyrex measuring cup) “i don’t care about such frippery!”

“it’s a celebration of our love.”

the fuck it is. i love him every day, anyway. the cat bears witness. a wedding is a poorly designed delivery system. more parts there are, more parts can break.

elopement disappoints others, and people say they have regrets, but those are seafaring tales. there’s no way to go through the fire without regret. i’ll tell my child to elope her heart out. o child, shut the computer. i wasted my summer looking at sticks and jars, and making guest lists that turned out just to be camouflaged magic eye pictures of disappointment.

Today I was in a park and I wondered if it had wi-fi. I was so ashamed. Also I never even got out of my car. I’m making a fitness tape called “These are My Exercise Socks — I Wear Them to Bed.”

—

Nothing so hopeless as lusting after a character. Sigh, modern love on the phone in the park parking lot. I don’t even mean a particular actor — I mean a fic-fucking-ticious character. Why don’t you go hump a vapor?

Your deflated hot cocoa.

No one could have predicted that “deflate” would be all over the news. It’s such a pleasant surprise — thrills me that a deeply embarrassing word like that is in the front of everyone’s mind.

I think it is one of the most embarrassing words out there.

My argument

Think of the most embarrassing, cringy word you know.

You think it’s “moist”? You’re wrong.

“Moist” is for plebes.

No, what I’m talking about (spins chair around, stands up suddenly) is the kind of word that has levels to it — bonus emotions like guilt, depression, dysfunction, the creaky disrepair of old age and the creeping stench of death. It’s coming! Plus the word has to be slightly, grossly sex-related, so that when you hear it and think of something sexual, you get mad at yourself. You have to get mad at yourself.

Side argument

I also, on opposite side, like “pique” as a sexy word. It has a lot of layers (peak, peek, pick, piquant, tang, saliva) and when you say it, you could be doing fake French, very nearly as sexy as Real French. vooujz a vlu jzean le damme?

yesterday to a colleague I said, “Welp, See ya later!” and I don’t think she knew what it meant. I got in my car and said, “This is why you’re not professional, the next time you ask me.” Then I drove to my bank and slept in the parking lot. Then I drove to the park.

Sometimes when I’m standing around eating old Christmas candy, saying, It’s going to be different! I think about my cat, who likes to dig and scratch at her litterbox after she poops. Doesn’t she realize it’s a hard plastic tub? She isn’t digging anything — no progress at all.

If you’re wondering, it’s the Sisyphean behavior that seems similar. This story wasn’t about how the old Christmas candy is like cat turds.

—

I have an unhealthy relationship with Max, the feature-creature on Netflix that tries to make recommendations to me. He’s never succeeded. And now when I bring him up he gets defensive and critical, and honestly it’s like I have a second boyfriend who is manipulative. I just ignore him now — that’s the closest I can get to dumping his fucking ass — but a friend came over and wanted to see him, and so I fired him up.

Right away, he flung some shit about how long it’s been since I last saw him. Then he asked me if I trusted him. Well isn’t this a little test! Drama and games. The truth is I don’t trust him, but I said yes, just like if we were having a fight in front of friends. So he just started a movie, right then, no questions asked. It was “Inventing the Abbotts,” which maybe I’ll want to see one day in 2023 when I’ve run out of everything else on my list.

I felt so bad stopping the movie. But then I realized he was a software program. I still want to read “The Gift of Fear.”

—

Today I rang the treat bag to see where my cat was. Sometimes I get these panics about her. I know I’ll be one of those moms that checks to see if the baby’s breathing every minute or so. I didn’t hear anything so I ramped it up and started shaking the bag really hard. Then I heard her frantically scratching her litter box in the basement.

I felt terrible, making her rush like that. No one likes to rush when they’re on the pot. I gave her three treats out of guilt.

i just looked up Dr. SBAITSO online so I could tell him he’s a bunghole and see if he recognizes it as an insult. My dad insists bunghole is not an insult and is a perfectly good word — but maybe that was a decade-long piece of performance art.

As you know I have a tendency to think things are performance art.

My dad also insists dillweed is not an insult. Now that I am grown up and once screamed, “WHERE IS THE DILLWEED?” while cooking, I see he has a point.

A bad idea for an invention would be a phone or app or something that automatically reads out loud your texts as you receive them–so you’re sitting there at a dinner party and I text you something awful about one of the dinner guests and in the middle of the dinner you hear a robotic voice coming from your purse say something bitter and cruel and not very funny. If it’s the movies it gets real quiet and everyone hovers their forks full of asparagus in mid air. If it’s real life there’s no dinner party at all and we’re on the toilet reading.